Sunday, August 12, 2007

browncoating it

firefly

when chris visits his parents' house they have a common practice of showing him various tv shows and movies that they really like. this past time when chris went home his parents showed him, among other things, the tv series firefly and its subsequent movie counterpart serenity. i don't know if chris had much hope of it being anything he would be interested in. but it turned out he really liked it, so much so that he brought the dvds home to show me.

now i'm not much one for science fiction (though i think that's changing slowly as i get older). although i have grown up with star wars, i've never watched star trek or aliens or most of the really science-fictiony stuff. but i figured i'd give firefly a chance since chris said it was so good.

boy was i surprised! i loved it. in fact, there were 14 episodes (including a 2 hour pilot) plus the movie and we watched it in less than a week. it was that good. and now that it's over i've been missing the characters and thinking about them a lot. that doesn't happen often with me and if it does, it's usually about book characters i'd just read. i think that's attributed to the great writing and acting in this series, and really fun stories too.

the deal with firefly is that it played on fox and the network pretty much screwed them over in various ways and then ended up cancelling the show half way through its first season. well, the show already had such a strong fan-base and the creator/writer/director, joss whedon (a la buffy the vampire slayer and angel), along with others, pushed really hard and were able to sign a movie deal with universal to finish up some of the story lines. so that's where the movie serenity comes in. it definitely would have been better to have the show continue, but since that wasn't going to happen, the movie did a good job of giving some closure to the whole deal.

in any event, if you've not yet seen this series, check it out. i think you'll turn into a browncoat too.

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